Ramapo and Warren Hills play inside a mostly empty gymnasium during the NJSIAA Group 3 girls basketball semifinal between Ramapo and Warren Hills at Ramapo High School in Franklin Lakes, NJ on 3-12-20. The NJSIAA ruled not to allow spectators into any game being played and only credentialed media, team personnel, and teams are allowed in.Scott Faytok | For NJ Advance Media

The coronavirus pandemic is keeping high school athletes from the field this spring.

But according to mental health experts, physically missing out on those experiences isn’t the only challenge those athletes are facing during this shelter-in-place, statewide lockdown.

Many of those athletes, now seeing weeks, or maybe months, of tireless training potentially lost, will struggle to handle the sudden reality of not playing this spring. For those not moving on to college athletics, a missed spring may mean the end for playing competitive sports.

Handling those emotions, and reality, is a big challenge for those athletes, experts said.

“Managing that negativity is really important,” said Chris Henrici, a Clinical Social Worker and Therapist specializing in athletes, based in Midland Park. “Thinking about things like the goals that they set and they strived for, long-term, outcome-oriented goals like being all-league, all-state, trying to win a county championship or a state championship, whether on an individual or team basis. These opportunities may be lost.”

Stuart Isralowitz, a child psychologist at Short Hills Associates in Springfield, echoed that growing challenge and acknowledged that, unlike adults, teenagers could have difficulty keeping perspective and seeing the bigger picture, even during a national crisis like this.

“I think that kids have a harder time looking at the longview than [adults]. That’s a significant difference. It might be easier for adults to say, ‘Well, this is lousy but we’re going to get through this and this is still temporary.’ I think sometimes, kids have a harder time and tend to be more impulsive and tend to have more frustration. As a generalization, It’s harder for them to deal with this because the longview is harder for them to see.”

Together with that sense of overall loss of goals and competition, student athletes are also dealing with the decimation of normalcy. At a time when these athletes were expecting to be playing a sport six days a week, whether in games or at practice, day-to-day routine has been ripped away from them. Finding a way to accept a new normal and remain ready to play is another challenge, the experts said.

One answer — just stay active.

"If you're a basketball player and you have a hoop in your driveway, play in your driveway," Isralowitz said. "If you're in some other sport, like track and field, and you can do some exercises that maintain your fitness and sense of purpose, even if it's not for immediate use, I think that's very beneficial. I think the exercise part is good for all of us. I think it's so easy to get complacent sitting around the house so much, we still need to find a way to exercise because it's good for our physical health and our mental health."

Another key: Getting support from those around you — now from teammates at a distance and families at a closer range — is another necessary ingredient for maintaining the mental health of high school athletes.

“Families are critical at this time but adolescents explore the world and gain support through their peers,” Henrici said. “We’ve had a revolution in technology over the past decade that allows them to achieve some of that, but every single kid I work with misses their friends - every single one. Without their friends, living at home with families where things can get tense — and that’s natural — I think that perspective is really hard to garner.”

This stoppage could give elite athletes — the ones that spend most of their time training, playing or practicing — a chance to develop other parts of their identity and facets of their lives that don’t revolve around sports, Henrici said.

”They are experiencing grief because there’s this huge part of their life that is now absent,” Henrici said. “It’s going to tax their ability to occupy themselves with another sense of their identity. Some of them are artists, some of them play other sports, some of them are going to hop on video games. But it’s typically an under-developed side of elite athletes.”

Finding a way to develop those other identities — whether it’s cooking with their families or spending time with their parents on chores around the house — is a good way to counteract the potential negative consequences that can arise, Henrici said.

How much each athlete is individually impacted could vary, the experts said.

"I think the more involved the student athlete is in the sport, the more they're very focused on it, probably the more time they've committed to it and the more invested they are and the harder it is for them to deal with this," Isralowitz said.

For some, this just means a short reprieve before either returning to high school sports next season or playing collegiately.

For others, it means, potentially, never playing again.

"You're talking about seniors that may go play club ball and maybe the next step is intramural softball at a major state university," Henrici said. Think about the emotional impact that way: they've trained so hard for so long and at that age, how do you make sense of this? How do you make sense of where all that hard work went? I don't think the hard work goes away. But as a young person who relies on the support of friends and their team, all of their support has been taken away from them.

“The top one or two percent have a different experience from your above-average high school athlete that wants to be all-league and enjoy his senior season.”